A Fourth of Beethoven

Call it fate, but Beethoven's Fourth Symphony has never had a chance to claim a more prominent place in the composer's mighty canon. It's sandwiched between the Third and Fifth Symphonies, both of which are not only high-water marks in Beethoven's career, but virtual monuments of Western culture as well. The Fourth comes a tad too late to be defined as a watershed Romantic symphony like "Eroica," the Third. (It also lacks the compelling backstory of Beethoven furiously scratching out the overreaching Napoleon's name and changing the dedication in a gesture of rebellion.) And for better or worse, the stirring opening motif of the Fifth is the one that has stuck in cultural memory.

To be fair, the Fourth does have a strong dominant motif, yet it lacks the storminess or high drama of so many of Beethoven's archetypal works. The patterns of abrupt accentuation and extreme orchestral contrasts are present, but the B-flat motif is, oddly enough, more backward- than forward-looking. It's almost as if a bright, playful theme of Hayden's (one of Beethoven's early supporters) had been whipped into a driving force that seeks, but never quite finds, a dynamic momentum or daring modulations. It's a bit like trying to take a four-cylinder engine to the limits that a six-cylinder can reach: trying hard, never burning out, but just not getting there.

Historically speaking, the best points of the Fourth are technical, as if parts of a career-long work in progress. Beethoven was experimenting with leaving themes unresolved in each movement, only to return to them later, opening a symphony quietly, with plaintive deliberation, and ending in a less than emphatic manner. Far from the celestial heights by which the "Ode to Joy" ends the Ninth Symphony, the Fourth finishes on a light note of everyday reassurance, aiming for neither pastoral innocence nor comic humility. Attempts to read humor or even a subtext of romantic love into this symphony simply aren't convincing, given what surrounds it in the composer's other works or, for that matter, those of his predecessors.

It would be unfair to expect a startling reinterpretation of this underrated symphony within the scope of the Nashville Symphony's Beethoven Festival, a celebratory—as opposed to an aesthetically pioneering—atmosphere. It was performed by the orchestra with Romantic aplomb. Indeed, conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn was in his element throughout the evening, drawing forth sharp textural contrasts between, for example, calm, ruminative woodwinds and tempestuous battalions of strings.

Ironically, though, there was far more coherence to the highlight of the concert's first half, Berlioz's Harold in Italy, a symphonic amalgam of tone poems that sketch various reveries and elegiac moods during his hiatus there. The furious turns of its final movement seem to out-Beethoven the master himself. Voiced dexterously through Daniel Renker's viola, the narrator is not the melancholy outcast of Byron's poem, but more like Byron's friend and fellow poet, Shelley. The idealistic voice of Berlioz's traveler unfailingly displays empathy and sensitivity to the regenerating cycles of nature.